In the late 1920s, urban nightclubs began to feature openly gay performers known as ‘pansy’s’, usually doing a song/dance/patter act, offering up wry, witty and sometimes self-deprecating humor;. The songs were suggestive and explored the double-nature of the pansy, a man who feels more feminine than masculine and prefers dressing
Yesterday I posted Busby Berkeley’s wonderfully choreographed ‘Hopping Dance’, performed by Bobby Van. The dance’s spiritual cousin–or perhaps it’s parent really–was a Berkeley production number from fifteen or so years earlier, ‘Horray For Hollywood’ from ‘Hollywood Hotel’ (1937). It features Benny Goodman and his then wildly successful swing era big
On Tuesday I reminisced a bit about my chance encounter with performer Bobby Van just months before his untimely death at age 51. I was perhaps a bit dismissive of Van’s talents and intend to rectify that today by offering up what is probably his career highlight, the ‘hopping song’
Before ‘The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis’ was a silly TV show, ‘The Affairs Of Dobie GIllis’ was a silly musical movie. (Before that it was a series of silly stories by Max Shulman who was responsible for all the silliness. He must have a made mega-ton of money from
Clearly I’m having a hard time with this being the NFL off-season. So I began today with the above compilation of disastrous football plays of yore and I must admit to feeling much better as a result. (Since it’s the NFL that compiled the clips, they make it unnecessarily hard
This week I’ve posted two examples of the stunning work of forgotten movie musical director/choreographer/designer Dave Gould. Above is one of his best sequences, the ‘Hollywood Party’ number from the 1934 film –er–‘Hollywood Party’. For a brief stretch in the 1930s, Gould was given the resources of major Hollywood studios–RKO,
Yesterday I posted the astonishing ‘The Continental’ dance sequence from ‘The Gay Divorcee’. It turns out it was the work of a man named Dave Gould, not Hermes Pan as I’d always assumed. Now, I don’t mean to sound like a jerk but there’s very little about movies of the
Here’s an extraordinary piece of musical filmmaking that really should be more celebrated than it is. It’s the big, fat, ultimate dance number from ‘The Gay Divorcee’ (1934), the second film to pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first to be properly considered a starring vehicle for them.
‘Monkey Business’ (1931) is the Marx Brothers third movie and the first not to be an adaptation of a stage play. The movie is a non-stop delight–75 or so minutes of one laugh after another., And yet the last line of the film is famously (amongst Marxists anyway) disappointing. After
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNnDaNSAog Apropos of Monday and Tuesday’s posts, which showed fights breaking out during baseball games as well as at the end of a boxing match, I was going to post a reel of NFL football fights. But isn’t that redundant? After all, the whole point of NFL football is to